Education & Consultation

Beyond models of what grief is supposed to look like

Education and consultation exploring grief, bereavement, death, dying, continuing relationships, meaning, identity, ambiguous loss, anticipatory grief, and the social and cultural contexts in which people grieve.

Programs can move beyond introductory grief education to examine the assumptions underlying how professionals understand and respond to loss.

When grief and trauma occupy the same territory

Loss may involve traumatic circumstances without making grief itself a pathology.

As an EMDRIA-Approved EMDR Trainer, Terri provides EMDR training, advanced education, and professional consultation exploring the intersections of trauma and grief, including traumatic bereavement, clinical decision-making, cognitive interweaves, and the complexities of addressing trauma without treating grief or continuing relationship as something that must be corrected.

Programs can be developed for clinicians seeking foundational EMDR training as well as experienced EMDR therapists interested in deepening their work with grief, death, and traumatic loss.

Supporting the people and systems left after a suicide

Suicide can affect families, colleagues, clinicians, first responders, organizations, and entire communities.

Education and consultation can address suicide bereavement, postvention, stigma, guilt and responsibility, unanswered questions, workplace and organizational response, and the particular complexities that can follow a suicide death.

Programs can be adapted for clinical, professional, organizational, or community settings.

Grief in cultures built to keep functioning

First responders and other high-exposure professionals encounter death, trauma, cumulative loss, responsibility, and human suffering within cultures where continuing to function is often part of the job.

Education and consultation can explore cumulative grief, traumatic and line-of-duty deaths, suicide, peer and leadership response, professional identity, organizational culture, and ways of responding that respect the realities of the work.

For the questions underneath the protocols

Work surrounding serious illness, dying, death, and grief often raises questions that cannot be answered by procedure alone.

Programs may explore mortality, meaning, uncertainty, identity, relationship, existential concerns, death anxiety, the experience of accompanying dying people, and what happens when professional knowledge reaches the edge of what it can explain.

Programs can be developed for clinicians, nurses, hospice and palliative-care professionals, death-care professionals, students, and others whose work brings them into sustained contact with dying and death.

When experience exceeds the available explanation

Experiences surrounding death, grief, trauma, dreams, altered states, near-death experiences, sensed presence, and other anomalous or extraordinary phenomena can create difficult territory for helping professionals.

Education and consultation can explore how to remain curious about a person's experience without prematurely explaining, pathologizing, validating, or dismissing its cause.

Different psychological, neurological, cultural, spiritual, phenomenological, and other frameworks may be considered while maintaining a distinction between the experience itself and the explanation assigned to it.

Sometimes the need isn't another training. It's somewhere to think.

Still Point offers consultation for professionals navigating complex grief, traumatic loss, death and dying, ambiguous situations, extraordinary experiences, or cases in which the usual frameworks do not seem to adequately describe what is happening.

Consultation is collaborative rather than prescriptive. The purpose is not necessarily to identify the “correct” conceptualization, but to examine what is known, what is being assumed, what remains uncertain, and what different perspectives make visible.

• a case doesn't fit comfortably within the usual grief or trauma frameworks; 
• grief and trauma appear intertwined; 
• the professional feels pressure to produce movement or resolution; 
• questions of meaning, spirituality, mortality, or extraordinary experience are present; 
• organizational or cultural context is shaping the experience; 
• you want another experienced clinician/thanatologist to think alongside you.

Not every organization needs an existing workshop.

Still Point can collaborate with organizations, professional groups, educational programs, and community partners to develop education around a particular population, challenge, or question.

A program may begin with something as specific as a difficult event, a recurring problem professionals are encountering, a population whose grief is poorly understood, or simply a question your team wants to think about more deeply.

You don't need to know what the training should look like before contacting Still Point. Figuring that out can be part of the consultation.

Terri is available for conferences, professional trainings, workshops, continuing-education programs, guest lectures, organizational education, and facilitated professional conversations.

Programs can range from focused presentations to extended workshops, consultation series, and customized educational experiences.